Examining transportation's role in social vulnerability : São Paulo, Brazil

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Abstract

The City of São Paulo is one of the largest cities in the world, with 11,244,369 people living in the metropolitan area and over 19,672,582 people living in the greater metropolitan region, which is made up of 38 cities in the surrounding area (IBGE, Census 2010). Ten percent of the population in the entire country of Brazil lives in São Paulo, and 15.6% of Brazil’s Gross Domestic Product comes from São Paulo. There is an average of 38.1 million trips taken per day in the metropolitan region. Most of the city’s low-income population lives in the periphery of the city, where the land is least expensive, yet most job opportunities are concentrated in the city center, creating a spatial mismatch. Spatial mismatch occurs when low-income residents live in one area of a city, but their places of employment and job opportunities are located in another part of the city. In a spatial mismatch situation, low-income residents often travel long distances to find work and suffer from isolation based on the disconnect between where they live, where they work, and the difficulty in getting from one place to another. The current transportation infrastructure is insufficient to transport the number of commuters from the periphery to and from the city center to work on a daily basis. In this study I will explore this spatial mismatch through an analysis of both qualitative and quantitative travel data for the entire São Paulo Metropolitan Area, with a specific focus on the Zona Sul of the periphery, in order to understand the limitations of transportation infrastructure and spatial mobility for residents of the city.